


Shine

by Loftec



Series: Book & Movie AUs [1]
Category: Shameless (US)
Genre: AU, Der Himmel über Berlin, M/M, Nonsense, and other such, life after death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-15
Updated: 2016-08-15
Packaged: 2018-08-08 22:46:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7776628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Loftec/pseuds/Loftec
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You’ve been dead for a good long while, that’s for sure. You don’t remember how or when, but you can’t even move without being reminded that, even without the specifics, dead is undoubtedly what you are.</p><p>The first time you save someone, it’s by accident.</p><p> </p><p>Explicit. Suicide tw. Please consult the notes at the start of the fic for details, if concerned.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shine

**Author's Note:**

> Explicit for sexual content.
> 
>  
> 
> Warning for dubcon voyeurism, and metaphysical stalking.
> 
> Warning for mentions of suicide and a general theme of suicide. Mention of past abuse and past sexual abuse (mention of Terry). Mentioned death of a major character, but this is an AU about ghosts/guardian angels/whatever, so. The dying is not the focus of the story.

.

 

 

You’ve been dead for a good long while, that’s for sure. You don’t remember how or when, but you can’t even move without being reminded that, even without the specifics, dead is undoubtedly what you are. Walking down a crowded street people will not notice you’re there, at best, and walk right through you if you’re not careful. So you’ve learned to be careful, to skirt the edges of a place, to walk through a crowd without touching anyone. You’re not entirely sure you know how you’re doing it, but it’s easy. You don’t have a body, anyway, you just have the vague memory of one.

The first time you save someone, it’s by accident. You’ve always been able to hear their thoughts, for as long as you can remember, but you never thought it was any of your business. You’ve witnessed first kisses, confessions, meltdowns, murders, and sometimes you hear something you shouldn’t have and you follow that person until they either change their mind or follow through. It feels impossible to ignore, or leave, even though you’d prefer not to stick around to see their lives slipping through their fingers. You’re not sure how long it’s been, but the first person you save has blue hair and safety pins in his ears, and fashion has changed around you so many times by now that you don’t even find it strange anymore. He’s on his bed with the disassembled pieces of a plastic razor next to him, sharp blade clutched between his fingers and hovering over his wrist. You know why he wants to die and you know why you can’t let him, so you sit down next to him and carefully touch your hand to his shoulder.

You think you can almost feel him under your hand when he starts crying and you think of your sister, when she was five and you were seven and she looked at you like you were her whole world. You can’t remember her name, or what happened after, but you can remember the feeling of being loved like a ball of warmth behind your eyes. You probably should, but you don’t hesitate when you give your memory to the guy and he drops the blade to the floor and slumps back on his bed with a torn sob. It takes a while before you realize that while you still have the memory of your sister in your mind, it’s lost its warmth.

So you swear to never do it again, but you do. A girl on a bridge, eating ice-cream with your aunt, an old man alone in his nursing home, getting an answer right in class when you were eight, a teenager with his father’s gun, your first kiss. You do it again and again for years and years and years and you think you’ll probably keep doing it until you’ve got nothing left to give. Considering what you started out with, you assume you won’t last for very much longer. You think that’s probably okay.

But then you start noticing something, hovering in the corner of your eye. Hot and cracking, angry yellow like a sun burning right behind your ear. Weak at first but stronger and stronger with each memory you give away, with piece after piece of your fractured past losing their shine. It scares you, because it’s new and you have no answers, and even though this existence of yours hardly is anything special to hang on to, it’s all you’ve got. You stop listening to people, and you pretend not to notice when they’ve got darkness in their minds.

You spend a lot of time at the library, because aside from the occasional melodramatic outburst of a student on a deadline, most minds in there are content, calm, transported. You listen to them then, to little kids reading their books slowly, every other word a revelation in their minds, to people reading about news, about adventure, about facts. You lose time in there, sweltering heat outside the big windows becoming blistering cold and whipping snow without you really noticing.

And its summer again when you suddenly find yourself outside, drawn to something you can’t put your finger on yet. They’re doing work on 35 East Wacker, the whole huge building covered in scaffolding and tarp, cranes and wires moving around the facade. The sun is setting and most of the workers are leaving the site, moving around you as they walk through the temporary gate. A quick glare of orange in the distance catches your eye and you watch as one of the workers walks across the site in the opposite direction of everybody else, almost like he is as unnoticeable as you are. He disappears into the building and you think you shouldn’t follow, but you do.

You find him on a ledge, not at the very top of the building, but high up enough to undoubtedly end him. He’s not revving to jump just yet, though, so you decide to wait him out, hope he’ll change his mind on his own. He’s still got his high-vis vest on and his yellow hardhat, and he’s sitting on the pale smooth stone of the old building, glowing cigarette hanging from his lips like his legs dangle over the edge. You sit down next to him and you try to think of a good thing you can bear to part with, in case you’ll need it to dissuade him. You’re scraping the bottom of the barrel at this point, and pick up a split second of a warm hand trailing up your naked back. You shiver as you hold on to it, try to somehow treasure the removed fraction of a memory while you’ve still got it intact.

The guy sighs and bends his head and his cigarette isn’t even half burnt when he holds it out in front of himself and flicks it out to the wind, watches as it spins and falls out of sight. You tense up and you want to leave when a shadow folds itself over his mind and he grips at the edge of the building with his hands. He exhales slowly and with it his shoulder moves away from your hand as you hover it above him. For all you know, this might be your final moment.

But it’s different when you finally touch him. He doesn’t take your memory, and he doesn’t jump. He sits there and breathes and he makes you feel more solid than you have since you died. It’s not unusual for people to not let you in, but you can’t recall a single person before this that hasn’t been broadcasting their goodbye for you to hear, loud and clear. You hold on to him and you feel like you’re holding out your good memory, just waiting for him to take it so you can leave. Only he doesn’t, so you stay.

And you sit there together until the silence stops unnerving you and somehow starts soothing you, and you keep your hand on his shoulder the whole time. He turns to look at you, once, his blank and tired eyes moving around to meet yours as though he somehow can tell you’re there. But it’s only for a split second before he turns back and bends his head, rubbing his hand over the back of his neck. 

You follow him down through the building, when he gets up and leaves, and you stand so close to him on the train you would be pressed together if only you had the physical mass to do so. He stares through you and out the window the whole ride, and you sway together with the twists and turns of the tracks. You try to remember what it feels like to breathe, and what other people smell like when they’re sweaty and tired and new in your life. You never go on the L, especially not during commuter hours, but you count the colors in his eyes and you hardly even notice the other people passing through you as new passengers squeeze themselves onboard.

He takes the pink line from State/Lake to Kedzie and the train is much lighter when he steps off with a handful of other commuters. He moves slowly, everyone else scurrying around him on the platform, in a hurry to get home. You walk in his wake, like he’s a shield and his presence keeps you protected from having the moving, unfamiliar bodies invade your space.

He lives in an old house a couple of blocks from the station and you linger on the street for a moment as you watch him climb the steps and disappear through the door. You rarely go into people’s homes anymore, you don’t like being where you don’t belong, but you’re also not ready to move on from whatever this feeling is. 

”Where have you been?” 

There’s a young woman in the kitchen, you give her a wide berth and move around her, find a corner to settle into, make sure you’ve got something solid at your back. She’s family, maybe a girlfriend, and her mind is anything but quiet. _He’s an hour late, what is he doing? What if he doesn’t come home? What am I gonna do? I can’t cover the bills on my own. He shouldn’t work at that site, it’s too dangerous. Maybe I could ask Sean to take him back. He hated working there. Sean doesn’t like him, anyway. Does he want me? Chaos junkie, the fuck does that even mean?_

”My day was great, thanks for asking,” your guy mutters, but doesn’t seem to care enough to sound upset, ”how was yours?”

”Ian,” the woman frowns and stops stirring the sizzling food on the stove for a second to glare at your guy. Ian. _He’s fine, he looks fine, he’ll be fine, he’s still alive_.

”Fi,” Ian deadpans and arches an eyebrow at her until she gives in with an annoyed shake of her head, wavy unkept hair bouncing around her shoulders as she turns back to her cooking. She’s his older sister and you stop listening to her real quick, her thoughts leaving you spinning and anxious. Ian leaves her to it, too, and climbs the kitchen stairs to find a bathroom and shower. You sit on the closed lid of the toilet and listen to the water hitting against his skin and you don’t look at him when he steps out and dries himself off. There are four beds in his room, two in a bunk in one corner, a single under the window and a crib in between. Ian puts on sweats and a t-shirt and sits on the single bed for a while, just staring into thin air.

By the time you follow him back downstairs, the house has been invaded. You stand in the corner by the back door, and you watch him and his family eat. Ian has two sisters and tree brothers and no parents to speak of. There’s Liam, a quiet four-year-old that would look like he didn’t belong if his older brothers and sisters hadn’t been so overtly doting on him, and there’s Carl, whose thoughts are a strange mix of dangerous impulse and tender protectiveness. Debbie looks the most like Ian, she seems headstrong and confused by her own desires, like she should be logical and level but can’t help but give in to the new, strong emotions coursing through her. Ian calls her Debs, as though Debbie wasn’t short enough already, and his older sister’s name is Fiona even though he rarely seems to get past the first syllable. She’s their legal guardian and it’s obvious she’s got a hard time letting go, _he’s nineteen, he needs to take care of himself, he can’t, what if he can’t, oh god I can’t do this alone_ , her smile is as bright as daylight and a little too wide most of the time, when her eyes don’t seem able to keep up.

The oldest brother comes home and joins them halfway through dinner, the whole table erupting in hearty greeting. Except for Ian, his shoulders stay slumped and tense, and he keeps eating at his slow steady pace as he looks up and observes his brother’s movements through the kitchen, grabbing a plate and sitting down. Lip is somewhere else in his mind, even as he asks about each of his siblings and responds to their questions about college, about some chick he seems gone for but no one else in the room approves of, privately. Their last name is Gallagher and it sounds like a promise when they think it. _I’m a Gallagher. We’re Gallaghers, it’s what we do._ A promise of what, you don’t know.

They’re noisy and brash, inside and out, but if you focus on the stillness of Ian they fall away into the background and become this homely distant noise. Ian doesn’t seem happier at home, but he seems comfortable. He takes a lot of pills, opens several different bottles from a high cabinet in the kitchen after dinner and swallows each one after the other, dutifully sipping a glass of water in between. He goes to bed early, and you sit on the floor with your back against his dresser next to his bed until he wakes up again.

You hang around, days become weeks become months, and you hang around. Ian doesn’t let you in, ever, but just being around him is soothing for you and even though it takes a while you slowly start to understand how. His closeness is like a shadow on the sun behind your back, his voice is like a breeze in the desert you’ve tended around you. When he laughs, fuck, when he laughs it’s like a waterfall coursing through you. You know you shouldn’t, but you linger in his presence and it’s so easy. You listen to him when he’s quiet, and when he’s arguing with Fiona, or haplessly advising Debbie on her high school drama (he’s really bad at it), or when he tries to steer Carl clear of things that will obviously get him into more trouble than it’s worth. You listen to him listening to Lip, trying too hard to restore some kind of fraternal confidence they’ve lost by detailing his tumultuous, but ultimately boring, relationship with an older woman. You want to know Ian’s thoughts on the matter but all you get when you try is another level of commentary from Lip, who knows that his obsession with this woman really isn’t love at all, and not very different from something he’s been afraid of for a long time. Something he once advised Ian against, a type of relationship that isn’t even, that is about power in all the wrong ways.

You listen to Ian when he’s alone with Liam, and this is what you like best, when Ian seems to drop his defenses and almost admits to small details about his everyday life, but mostly talks nonsense with no agenda and little to no filter holding him back. Sometimes you imagine that he’s talking to you, and if you remembered how to reply you would.

He doesn’t really talk much to people at work, he uses the hard labour as a valid excuse to stay quiet during shifts and somehow manages to join in enough on breaks to get away with it; laughs quietly when other people laugh; makes quick, dry jokes that mean nothing but keeps him from being questioned. He stays behind almost every day and climbs out on the facade to smoke a cigarette. You sit with him and when he’s got his eyes trained far into the distance, slowly sweeping across the cityscape, you watch his profile carefully and try your best to tap into what it is he’s feeling. You think he’s probably not going to jump, that the heaviness you felt the first time you met him isn’t about wanting to die, but more like not caring about living. It’s a fine difference, but you think you’re starting to get it.

Still, you watch out for any sign of change. But mostly you just watch, watch his lips barely holding on to his cigarette, his eyes half-lidded and closing for long moments, rather than blinking. His freckles fading a little more each day as the sun becomes quicker and the temperature drops, his light ginger scruff coming and going every other day. Watch him stand by the sink in the mornings, deliberating if he can be bothered to shave and seemingly arbitrarily deciding one way or the other.

You watch him eat and most days dinner ends up a big family affair, even the neighbors seem comfortable stopping by from time to time with their twin toddlers and offering their own food as contribution. Ian remains the eye of the storm they build around him, and he seems content to let his family orbit him, big and loud. Most of the time he’s got his eyes on his food, or on the center of the table, or vaguely on the face of whoever’s talking the loudest at any given moment. But sometimes, sometimes he stares right at you, like he isn’t aware of the people to his left and right, demanding his attention. Like your quiet, empty corner of the room is more interesting to him. You know he can’t see you, because strictly speaking you don’t exist, but when he looks at you you almost manage to forget this and imagine yourself filling out the air around you, pushing dust and sunlight out of the way and solidifying out of nothing, the floorboards creaking under your weight.

Sometimes he’s got a day off and usually he spends those days at home, Lip off at college and Fiona leaving early, Debbie and Carl rushing off an hour later for school. Ian watches movies with Liam, supervises the kid as he takes baths, makes them sandwiches for lunch that they eat in companionable silence, and he sits and smokes on the front steps as he monitors Liam’s movements on the narrow excuse of a front lawn. You sit down next to him, like you always do, and you mirror him as you too keep your eyes on his baby brother, lost in his nonsensical games and babbling to himself in his own, new language while carrying his toys around with seemingly aimless purpose. Ian stubs out his cigarette and you think you must have been with him for a few months at this point, because even though you can’t feel the cold there are white puffs coming out of his mouth with each quiet exhale telling you you’re likely already on the cusp of another winter.

”What’s your name?” Ian’s voice is low and gravelly, and takes you by surprise. Even more surprising is the fact that you somehow try to reply, painfully, physically, aware of that you really can’t. 

_Mickey._

It’s almost like you can hear your own voice though, when you try, a faint memory or echo of a sound. You haven’t tried to talk to anyone for decades, at least, and honestly you thought you’d never want to try again. A long time ago you’d tried so hard to shout and stir shit up, make any kind of sound to alert the living of your situation, or attract the attention of anyone that might be anything same as you, and nothing ever came of it. Nothing comes of it now, either, but Ian remains quiet and he nods his head ever so slightly, like he’s agreeing with his own thoughts.

”I’m Ian,” he then says, voice quiet and mouth barely moving. You stare at him for a very long time after that, hoping against all fucking hope that he’ll turn and look at you, that maybe you’ve been wrong all this time and you can still be both heard and seen. But he doesn’t, he doesn’t look at you, and you think he’s probably just having a conversation with himself, or with some other voice in his head, and you filling in the blanks doesn’t mean shit. It doesn’t mean he can hear you.

But you start talking to him after that, anyway, you try not to at first but it’s a struggle you know you’ve lost right off the bat. You stalk after him at work, high up on the scaffolding, or deep inside the hulled out building, or in and out across the dug-out construction site on the ground, and you tell him in short, muted sentences to _watch out_ when someone drops something from above, to _hold on_ when there’s a strong gust of wind coming in, to _pay attention_ when he’s almost knocked over by a lifting hook dangling past him, missing him only by a couple of inches. He huffs and frowns when he notices, a reaction you feel isn’t at all right for someone who’s only barely avoided being struck down by a 300 pound metal lump. But Ian just shakes his head and scratches at the back of his neck as he walks away and continues working.

Slowly, over the next few weeks, you start talking to him properly. Whole sentences sometimes, about the weather or that asshole Anderson who works the main crane, like _man, incompetent doesn’t have nearly enough syllables to cover all the ways that guy fucks up, fucking daily_ , and you yell after people who bump into him on crowded platforms, everyone always in a hurry compared to Ian’s reluctant progress. He always rubs at his shoulder where they’ve crashed into him and he almost smiles to himself when you flip the person off as they disappear into the bustling crowd, _yeah, alright asshole, try gettin’ up five minutes earlier next time, fuck._ He has a hard time sleeping, sometimes, and you follow him downstairs when he gives up on trying and he channel surfs the 3 am bullshit the TV has to offer. You’ve never really watched TV before, and you fight it at first because _holy hell, this is stupid_. But it doesn’t take long until that hour Ian manages before finally falling asleep on the couch becomes your favorite hour of the day, where you sit next to him and you’re only vaguely aware of his head falling back and his eyes falling shut, and the TV flickers its soft light across his calm face and you think he leaves enough space for you to fit in next to him on the couch for a reason. When the whole house is asleep aside from the two of you, and you kinda feel like you’re learning to be some sorta person again just from complaining about all the fucked up people and stupid shit you end up watching with him.

_The fuck needs a travel size cleaning kit for fucking silverware, anyway?_

_This fucking guy again? Didn’t he die last week?_

_Yeah, okay douchebag, go back to fucking Twitshire, England, if you don’t like it. Ain’t nobody forcing you to live in the greatest country in the world._

Ian smirks sometimes when you forget yourself and you imagine yourself at full force, hand gesturing towards the screen and voice dripping with distain. You glance at him when he does and you almost let yourself believe that he’s laughing at you, even though it’s infinitely more likely he’s actually finding the shit on the TV funny. Because, and it’s weird because you shouldn’t have to remind yourself of this, you’re not actually there and he can’t actually hear you.

But then you start telling him stuff about yourself. Not about _you_ , because _you_ don’t even know _that you_ , but about this new you that has existed for a really long time at this point, but never had a reason to be defined before now. You tell him about all the people you’ve talked down, about the ones you didn’t, and you tell him about the different ages you’ve seen, a little surprised when you actually remember a lot more of that shit than you expected. You’ve spent so long feeling apart from everything around you, so focused on every second, every moment of _now_ , that you’ve never really felt like you’ve known _when now is_.

It’s becoming clearer.

 _I know that guy_ , you tell him one night, pointing at the TV and ignoring the fact that you’ve gone full on pathetic in your delusions, _wanted to shoot himself in the head when he was like, fifteen. Fuck is he doing?_

He’s running for office, it seems, he can’t be more than 35 at this point but he looks closer to 45, deep cut lines down his puffy face. His commercial is on at 3:25 in the morning and it’s stupid as shit, but it still hurts like hell to see this guy you snatched from the desperate edge of death still denying the things that made him want to die in the first place. You remember how deeply in love he was with his best friend, the jock with the nice ass, and you remember the unwanted pregnancy that came as a result of his desperate attempt at self-administrated conversion therapy. He’s on TV now, and he’s both pro life and against marriage equality and it fucks you up in a way you never would’ve expected.

 _Gave that fucking guy the shine off my first kiss_ , you mutter and wish you could have it back, if only for a second, _what a fucking waste of space. Shoulda let him go through with it._

Ian turns off the TV, abruptly, and when you look at him he’s got this weird, disturbed look on his face, brows furrowed and eyes on his hands as he scratches the nail of his thumb up and down the side of the battered, old remote. You wonder if he’s thinking about the politician too, or if he’s somewhere else entirely.

 _What’s wrong?_

You ask it even though you know there’s no point, and you wish, not for the first time, that you could find a way to touch him when he sighs and gets up off the couch. He climbs the stairs, his steps slow and heavy, and silently creeps into his room so he doesn’t disturb his younger brothers. You watch him as he settles in under the covers, facing the wall and turning his back to you. To the room. Usually, he’s turned the other way and usually he ends up sleeping right by the edge of the bed, unknowingly really close to where you sit your nightly vigil. His hand often ends up dangling off the edge of the mattress and sometimes you bring out one of the few intact memories you’ve still got left, of a dry, warm hand finding yours in the flickering dark of a movie theatre, hidden under a navy blue coat, and you imagine that the hand belongs to him.

But now you stand in the middle of the room and watch his shoulder rise and fall with his slow, steady breathing, before you succumb to this pretty dumb desire you’ve had for a really long time. You place yourself behind him, on the bed, and imagine yourself with bent knees to fit against the back of his, and folded arms tightly across your chest, to keep yourself from falling into him entirely. His breathing seems to slow down the second you settle in, and you draw constellations between the freckles on the back of his neck until he wakes up the next morning.

He calls work and asks for the morning off, for a doctor’s appointment, and then he takes the pink line like he always does. Only this time he walks to Lake when he gets off and takes the red line until he reaches Fullerton. He’s taken this trip before, like a habit, maybe once every two weeks or once a month, since you’ve been with him. But he always shrouds himself in discomfort when he does and he keeps you out with more effort than it usually takes. You get it, and you always leave him alone when he disappears into the clinic. Sometimes you sit in the waiting room and listen to the receptionist reading confidential files, but she must have been fired because you don’t recognize the guy manning the desk today, taking Ian’s name when he steps inside. So you wander through the streets, feeling strangely ill at ease in the neighborhood, fancy as shit and most likely not your usual stomping grounds even when you were alive. The healthcare is probably better here though, than at some free clinic back of the yards, and you’re happy Ian’s got somewhere to go. You know he worries about his mind, you think that’s partly why you can’t read him at all. You know he takes a lot of pills to steady it, to manage it and keep it from betraying him, running away with him. You know he’s bipolar and you’re slowly starting to understand what that means, exactly. You know he’s doing comparatively good now, even though you’d hesitate to agree with Fiona’s internal chants of _he’s doing real good, he’s getting better_ whenever her worry threatens to boil over. You know he’s not off the rails, or suicidal, but he’s not happy either and you really want him to be happy.

You don’t know why he feels like he needs to see his therapist now, can’t think of anything different that’s been going on with Ian this week that wasn’t going on last week. Maybe it’s the irregular sleeping pattern, but he doesn’t seem too affected by that. Maybe there’s something you’ve missed, even while spending your every moment in his presence.

Ian takes you to a small coffeeshop around the corner after he steps back out on the street, lighting a cigarette and smoking half of it on the way there, and the other half standing outside the big glass windows. You wait for him to finish and then follow him inside, sitting down at your usual booth while he orders his decaf black filter coffee.

You know he doesn’t actually take you for coffee but after every session he has a cup in solitude, staring out the window at the people passing by, and it’s like he’s slowly accepting you back into his space. And you imagine that he sits down in _your_ booth because you chose it for the two of you, and you imagine that when you make up little stories about people passing by on the sidewalk outside (and only _sometimes_ actually use their own thoughts as inspiration) it makes him smile that tiny secret smirk you’ve become addicted to, real fast.

Today he stares right at you, though, with a thoughtful frown and not even the smallest hint of a smile in there, and you keep quiet and try your hardest to meet his piercing gaze. He goes out that night, for the first time since you’ve been with him, after his half day of work. He goes to a small bar on Halsted and finds a well built guy with skin like shining bronze under the bar’s red and green lights, and they take a taxi together to the guy’s on-campus dorm room. You don’t know how to feel when you hear the guy’s thoughts about Ian, what he wants from him, how he wants him, but you know you’re not looking to stick around and witness the fantasy come to life, so you go home and you wait for Ian to eventually join you in his bed at 2 in the morning.

Ian must’ve had some kinda dry spell while you’ve been with him, because after that first guy it’s like he’s kicking back into action and there’s another one the following week, from the same bar, and then two in quick succession the week after that, both somehow inviting him over outta nowhere on his tiny, weird computer he insists on referring to as a ’phone’, even though you rarely see him talking into it. You want to stay away when he's hooking up, but each time you find yourself lingering in his presence a little longer, until Ian’s reached guy number eleven and you’re standing in a dark corner of a moonlit bedroom and you’re watching him languidly push and pull himself in and out of this stocky, pasty pale guy that can’t stop moaning like some over-eager bitch. You want to leave, you’ve wanted to leave since the guy put his tongue in Ian’s mouth and didn’t stop until he was pushed down on the bed and pried open by Ian’s long, slicked-up fingers. And now you want to leave like an ache through your entire existence but you don’t, and then Ian suddenly looks up and without wavering meets your eyes and you can’t, he keeps you right where you are as he grabs on to the prostrate body in front of him, by the hips, and starts pounding into the guy’s stretched hole. You can almost feel it like a queazy, warm, fucking tingly flood of projected emotion and release when Ian finally stops looking at you to close his eyes and stutter his hips through his orgasm, his mouth falling slack and his breath coming out like a wordless moan. 

You leave that night and you don’t come back for a really long time. You’re not sure how long, but this time you do take notice of the world changing around you and you think you manage a whole year at least, maybe a year and a half, before you once more find yourself in the corner of Ian’s kitchen. If it weren’t for the kids looking older, and Ian’s hair looking different, and the AC they’ve got working up a breeze in the open window, you would have suspected that no time had passed at all, despite your best efforts. 

You back up into your corner and you listen, you open all the channels and you pay attention to all different levels of information, soaking it up. Fiona’s no longer concerned with that Sean asshole you never liked, but some other dude you’re probably not bound to like much, either. Lip’s on break, presumably for summer, and he’s trying to persuade Ian to get him a job at his new site, even while his thoughts scream at him to stop because, _God, that shit nearly killed you last time and Amanda’s dad’s got that cushy situation just ready to go, you don’t owe this place anything, you’re not Frank, you don’t wanna be like Frank, come on, what’s my fucking problem? What am I doing?_

Debbie’s caught in the middle of some new high school drama you quickly tune out, and Carl’s mind is just casually replaying scenes from pornos he was watching last night, it’s overwhelmingly gay at first which distracts you for a second, but then boobs come into play and you step way the fuck away from that mental image, real fast. You’ve spent a long time assuming that your sexuality went away with everything else, when you died, but it’s flaring up along with this sense of long lost solidity you get as you settle back into Ian’s presence. Ian, Ian’s head is bent over his food, brows furrowed in concentration. He’s still a blank wall for your careful probes to bounce off of, and you find it a huge relief somehow. You don’t actually like being privy to people’s thoughts and feelings, and just being around Ian for a minute you realize how much you’ve missed him.

You’re leisurely listening to Liam’s mind singing a garbled rendition of some TV-show theme song, distracted by how much more coherent a year and a half has made the kid, when it’s like the space around Ian implodes and his mind suddenly becomes like a current pulling you in and flooding your every sense.

For a split second it’s pressingly quiet, like a vacuum, and then in that vacuum there’s the one sharp demand. _Mick?_

You’re ejected as quickly as you were pulled in and when you try to approach him again his walls are back up, firm as ever. But now he’s looking at you, eyes scanning your corner until they fix on you with unnerving certainty, wide and disbelieving. 

”Mickey?” He says out loud this time and you’re stunned into silence by it, along with the rest of his family. Fiona stops mid sentence and turns to stare at her brother, her mind a long string of panicked expletives. Lip leans back in his seat and crosses his arms with a sigh, most likely to cover up the fear rumbling through him. Debbie looks like she wants to say something, mouth moving slightly, but her mind is blank. Liam’s still singing, like this absurd background track to the standoff going on over his head, and Carl stops thinking about slicked up body parts and ample bosoms long enough to frown and, without missing a beat, ask what everyone’s trying not to.

”Who’s Mickey?”

 _Oh God, fuck, not this again! He was doing so good. I can’t deal with this right now. I can’t deal with this again._ The chatter is overwhelming, Fiona and Lip outdoing themselves with their racing thoughts, so you resolutely tune them out and you focus solely on Ian. You think he does seem better; broader, stronger, surer, his skin clearer and the darkness under his eyes faded. You hadn’t given it much thought last time, but really looking at him now puts your memory of him in perspective. He’s been doing good while you’ve been gone, and the second you step back into his life it’s like you’re triggering a volcano. 

And now he’s still looking at you even though he knows his family is waiting for some kind of explanation. So you leave, before he says anything, because he somehow knows your name, and he knows you’re there, and if this means that he somehow can sense you, understand you, your presence must have seemed like madness to him, to anyone.

You can’t do that to him, no matter how badly you want to stay with him. He’s got enough on his mind without you there, warping it up further. You vow to never go back again.

You manage maybe two months, the passage of time somehow painfully clear to you now when you can’t stop noticing the sun moving with each day and the leaves starting to fall off the trees on the street outside the library. You don’t spend all your time there, anymore, each morning you go to State/Lake and you stand on the opposite platform from where you know Ian will get off, where he invariably will linger for a second after the train has revved back into motion and cleared the station. 57 times you watch him pause on that platform before he goes to work, until one day he’s not on his usual train, or on the one after, and before you know it you find yourself back in his bedroom, prepared for the worst.

He smiles when you arrive, but he doesn’t look at you. He’s sitting on his bed, and it’s made and he’s fully clothed so you don’t think he’s sick, and he pulls out a cigarette and lights it. Waits for you to sit down next to him before he speaks.

”It’s my day off,” he reminds you, and you think you should tell him that his schedule has changed since the last time you hung around, _fuck you very much_ , but you don’t.

”You’ve been gone,” he says, his voice still a low mumble, like he’s not sure he should be speaking out loud. You nod but remain silent.

”It’s like,” he sighs and pulls his hand down his face, cigarette still held gingerly between two fingers, ”can feel you like a… pressure. Like an itch.”

You frown, because that sounds fucking awful, but then he cocks a small, crooked smile and he wedges his cigarette back between his lips to puff at it while he speaks around it.

”Like a kiss,” he mumbles, which sounds a fuckton better and not good at all, all the same, ”like… perfect temperature.”

You scoff, and it’s such a physical reaction you kinda startle yourself when you do.

”Told my therapist about you,” Ian says and hesitates a little, taking the cigarette and tapping some of its ash off into an empty cup standing on the dresser before he continues, ”didn’t want to at first because I didn’t want you to go away, didn’t want her to tell me you were this bad thing. But you kinda went away anyway, and I don’t know why. I don’t feel in control of you, at all.”

He huffs and bends his head, eyes on his hand as he gently thumbs at the filter of his still burning cigarette.

”This is crazy, right?” he asks, like he isn’t sure. ”I mean, this is certifiably crazy, right? I’m legit talking to myself right now, trying to hear voices like… like I’ve fucking missed hearing your voice, how fucked up is that?”

You don’t know what to say, so you remain silent and wait for him to take another deep drag off his cigarette and get through whatever it is he wants to tell you.

”Eva, my therapist, although you probably already know this,” he nods a little when you shake your head, ”she said that coping mechanisms aren’t inherently bad, that they’re there to, you know, help you cope. So even though hearing voices gotta be scary, doesn’t mean they’re bad.”

He hums a little to himself, like he’s not sure he agrees, or understands. You’d agree with him on both accounts, you think, even though you’re the one responsible for the voice he’s been hearing and you know you’ve never been out to hurt him.

He sucks on his teeth and slowly exhales a lungful of smoke, curling through the room. ”Never scared me, Mick, you-”

He sighs and bends his head. ”Fuck, I don’t-”

You’re thinking about leaving again when you see the side of his mouth quirk up in a lopsided smile, and he looks up from under his eyelashes and right at you, this strange new glint to his eyes you don’t remember.

”Missed you.”

You want to tell him he’s not crazy, that you’re not some figment of his imagination, but you assume that’s exactly what a figment of imagination would say, so you don’t. Besides, you don’t remember enough about being alive to convince him that you’re your own person, someone who used to be more than just Ian’s ghost.

”You remember that guy Fairchild?” he then says, voice pensive but assertive, ”Chris Fairchild? The republican. Was watching his commercial that one night, years ago now, and you said he’d once tried to kill himself and that you wished you’d let him. I mean, I was convinced at that point that you were just this symptom of my crazy, so you saying something like that really freaked me out. But then you went away some time after that, and I don’t know… I didn’t want you to go, but you did anyway. So I looked him up.”

He clears his throat and reaches over to drop the end of his cigarette into the cup-come-ashtray.

”Turns out he was committed, once in ’93 after a botched suicide attempt and then another time like a year later. But like, that time it’s full on scary Christian cult conversion therapy.” He leans back against the wall, stretching out across the modest breadth of the narrow bed. ”This guy I’ve never seen before, and this voice in my head tells me stuff that’s so…”

You look back at him in time to see him furrowing his brows in thought.

”Real.”

 _Fuck this shit,_ you decide before thinking it over properly, and you feel strange when Ian coughs out a startled laugh next to you. You stare down at his hand for a good minute trying to think of anything you can say to make this bitch of a situation better. Then the itch of an idea kicks you into action and without considering what it might mean, you reach over and imagine your hand on top of his. Ian turns his around then, awkwardly resting it on his thigh with his palm up, and you fit your hand more easily against it. You can almost feel something when he, staring at his empty hand, starts to slowly move his thumb, as though stroking it up and down the side of your hand.

Without looking to see if he follows, you get up and walk down the stairs, through the house, and out on the porch. You stay there for a few moments, waiting, and you’re almost relieved when you think that he probably isn’t coming after you.

But then the door opens behind you and he steps out next to you, a freshly lit cigarette hanging from his lips and his hands busy adjusting the collar on his jacket. He says nothing but stops and stands with you, looking perfectly content with waiting you out, until you walk down the stairs and out on the street. He follows you, block after block, and you imagine that the sound of his steps behind you are actually the sound of your own feet against the sidewalk.

You take him to a local high school, you feel nothing when you remember it but the image of sitting through English with Mr Venders, longingly looking out the first floor windows at the empty playground, is enough to cement in you that this was once your school. You take Ian to the small library, deep inside the sprawling building, and you’re strangely proud of him when he easily gets past the guards and then moves through the students sitting at long rows of tables, nose deep in textbooks and computers. You kinda get computers, now, for a long time they just seemed like really ugly TV:s and then, oddly, like overachieving handbags. The internet makes a lot of sense though, especially when you’ve spent as much time as you have looking over Ian’s shoulder and laughing at dumb cat videos, and biting your lip as you pretend to know what he smells like, hovering the tip of your nose over the back of his neck as pitchy grunts and moans flow from his computer’s tinny speakers, and the shiny bodies on the screen slap against each other in tandem with Ian’s hand, up and down his really pretty impressive dick. You’re flushed with embarrassment at the memory now, as though the part of you that remembers having bodily reactions grows stronger inside this building where you once, a long time ago, spent a large part of your teenage years. All the intimate moments you’ve stolen from Ian since you met him is not the thing that should be on your mind right now, though, especially not considering the implications of Ian apparently having been aware of your presence whenever you invaded his privacy. Fucking yikes.

You guess that actually makes it a little better though, because you’ve felt wholly guilty about your increasing inability to step back from Ian’s sexually and emotionally vulnerable moments. The thought that maybe this was because Ian somehow wanted you to stay kinda changes everything. Makes you more like a participant, rather than the worst kinda creepy peeping Tom. Your presence never seemed to bother Ian, he’s certainly never been shy around you. And you’re thinking about his dick again, it’s like simply being in this building is reverting you back to embarrassingly fifteen.

You’d slap yourself if you could, to snap out of it, and you take him to one of the back shelves where he finds a whole section of past yearbooks. You watch him as he walks along the years and hesitates with his hand over a shelf stacked with older catalogues, spines scruffy and dented.

He looks at you for a second before he settles on one of the old books and carefully pulls it out. He flips through it, slowly, and you feel strangely nervous about it, all of a sudden not sure if he’s going to find you in there. Maybe you never were real, maybe this is some next level bullshit and you’re about to find out that you actually are a manifestation of Ian’s insanity or something. But Ian is far from insane, and you know you don’t exist because of him. You just wish you were alive because of him.

His frown deepens and he stops somewhere halfway through the book, keeping the spread open with his hand on the fold between the pages. He holds the book out a little, and you move to his elbow so you can study it closer with him.

”That’s, I mean-,” he says and gently passes his fingertips over one of the head shots at the bottom right of the page, ”that’s you, isn’t it?”

He finds your name in the list next to the picture, House, the Lake twins, Milkovich.

”Mickey Milkovich,” he says, like he’s trying it out, then he quickly closes the book with his hand sandwiched on the right page and confirms the year on the front cover before opening it to look at your picture again, ”1954, holy shit Mick, 64 years.”

 _Insane_ , you agree without thinking of how that might sound to the guy currently hearing voices in his head, but it somehow seems to be just right because Ian snorts out a loud laugh that gets him a couple of admonishing glares from nearby students. He takes the yearbook with him over to a bulky, beige-grey computer at the other end of the library. He somehow manages to hack his way in there (you usually end up filing most of the many inexplicable things people do with computers under ’hacking’) and types ’Mickey Milkovich, Chicago, 1954’ into the cat/porn database. You expect him to come up with nothing, but high up on the list of hits are links to old articles, and the high-contrast black and white photos attached all seem to be of you. Mostly it’s your yearbook headshot, and sometimes it’s paired with a picture of a vaguely familiar older man’s bloodied mugshot. You try to read some of the words that come with the pictures but they blur and spin and before you realize you’re doing it you’ve ejected yourself from the library and you find yourself back on the Gallagher front porch, alone.

You wait for Ian to get home, pacing up and down the street outside his house and trying your hardest to imagine what your feet would look like, what kind of shoes you would wear. You think of your picture and you try to connect it to your own sense of self. You’ve never liked having your photograph taken, that much you can say with certainty, but try as you might you can’t remember what it was like to look in a mirror and see someone looking back, or imagine what that someone would look like. 

You have black hair, you think, and blue eyes, and pale-ass skin that hates the sun. You don’t like shirts that cover your shoulders, or shoes that are too white.

You’re sitting on the stairs and the sun is setting when Ian comes back home. He stops in front of you and says nothing, just looks at the stupid space of thin air where you should be sitting, until you lose your patience.

 _What did it say?_ You ask and almost want to run away again when Ian’s mouth opens and closes a couple of times, like he’s trying to figure out what to tell you.

”You don’t know?” He eventually seems to settle on with a small frown, growing deeper when you shake your head. ”It’s kind of a lot.”

You stay quiet, waiting for him to continue. You know it’s not going to be easy to hear, but you think you’ve probably been running away from whatever it is for long enough, and at this point you could do with some change. You can’t haunt Ian for the rest of his life, either, so some kind of chance to move on, up or down, is probably the best you have to hope for.

”You were 19,” Ian says with a deep sigh, shoving his hands into the pockets of his jacket, looking a little uncomfortable where he stands and with your full attention on him, ”when you died. 1954, summer, you’d just left high school.”

 _Did I kill myself?_ You ask, because that would make a lot of sense, considering. Also, depending on ones system of belief, that might mean you’re pretty screwed as far as heaven is concerned. Ian sighs again and sits down next to you, like he has a hard time looking at you. Which is stupid because he still can’t see you, but whatever.

”Officially,” he says, reluctantly, ”you were shot dead by your dad.”

This sounds like something that would be terribly upsetting to hear, but it just kinda makes sense. You imagine your leg, dressed in your favorite worn pair of jeans, reassuringly pressed against the side of Ian’s thigh.

”Yeah,” he hums, and absentmindedly rubs his hand up and down his leg, right where you’re trying to touch him, ”read a lot of articles about it, said he found out you were gay and killed you for it. There were two eyewitnesses, your sister and one of the neighbors, after you ran out on the street for help and your dad came after you with a gun.”

He sniffs and clasps his hands together, leaning his elbows on his knees.

”But I found this interview with your sister, Mandy,” the sound and instant memory of her name hits you hard, if nothing else does, ”just a couple of years ago, she’s still alive, you knew that? She says you found out about him… doing some fucked up shit with her, and you- you goaded him, or something. Came out and told him to come at you. She says she thinks you saved her, that maybe you… killed yourself, in some way, tryna-”

You nod when Ian gestures vaguely in front of himself instead of finishing his sentence, swallowing down his words when the reality of your past seems to overwhelm him.

 _Gay kid with no fucking future,_ you say, like it’s some sorta explanation for what you did, wincing at how you sound when you say it, _must’ve gotten him life, at least, right?_

Ian nods. ”Got the chair, Mick, couple of years on death row and then-”

He makes this stupid noise at the back of his throat instead of saying the actual words and you kinda love him a little, for no fucking reason at all. You want to tell him, but you don’t.

 _So what now?_ You ask instead, hoping that Ian might have some of the answers you’ve been existing without for so long.

He looks down at his hands, thumbnail worrying at an old scab, just above one of his left hand knuckles. 

”You did good, Mickey,” he says, voice low, ”you kept your sister safe, you brought that fucking monster down. You’ve saved so many people since, like- the things you’ve told me, Mick. You saved my life, for sure.”

Your heart swells at his words, starts beating faster and it feels, it just _feels_ , real and solid and hard. You don’t want to leave, you don’t want to leave him.

”You’ve got nothing to pay for,” he says with a pained grimace, ”if that’s why you’re stuck. If you’re supposed to like, move on or something. You can.”

You can almost feel your body solidifying next to him, his heat and scent almost reaching you and grounding you in reality. You turn to face him and put a hand to his cheek to carefully guide him closer. You can almost taste the anticipation on your own cracked lips as you imagine your tongue darting out and wetting them, mere inches away from Ian’s quickening breath, and you kiss him, as well as you fucking can without having anything real to actually give him. And then you go away.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_I will take him in my arms, and he will take me in his._

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

”Gallagher!”

Ian looks up and wipes some of the sweat off his brow, the back of his hand dark with the dust particles stuck to his face. He squints over at his foreman and straightens up a little more. ”Yeah?”

”Time,” Harris reminds him and holds up his left hand, tapping pointedly at his wrist in case Ian can’t hear him, ”go home, kid.”

Ian sighs and looks down at the mess around him, he thought he’d be finished with this before his shift was over. He’s been feeling a little sluggish lately and he doesn’t know if he needs to worry about it, yet. He heaves himself out of his freshly dug hole and makes sure it and all the machinery involved are properly covered before he grabs his jacket and walks over to where Harris is supervising a precision lift.

”Going,” Ian tells him, but doesn’t linger to chat because he knows better than to cause a distraction with a 640 lbs H-beam slowly swinging through the air above them.

”Great job today, Gallagher,” Harris calls out after him, without turning away from his task, ”see ya tomorrow.”

Ian nods, even though he knows Harris can’t see him, and walks in a wide circle around the work site, so to make sure he stays out of the way of the drop zone.

He takes the train straight home, standing by the doors the whole time and carefully pressing his forehead against the worn plexiglass windows, watching the myriad of apartment buildings whooshing past. Lately he’s been thinking about moving out, finding himself a small place somewhere, become his own household. He’s got the money, not a lot of it after all the bills are paid but ever since Harris helped him negotiate his new contract to include full benefits he’s doing a lot better for himself. Most of his money disappears into the family fund still and while he doesn’t really mind it, he feels like he might be ready to move on.

It has nothing to do with Mickey. Mickey’s been gone for four months and sixteen days, now, and while he still seems to miss him like he’s lost a limb, Ian’s starting to maybe come to terms with it being over, whatever it was. He’s talked to his therapist about it, a little, but mostly he just nods and agrees when she and his family talk about ’him’, always making it sound like he was something Ian made up. Eva seemed to think it was a done deal when he reluctantly came clean to her about the extent to which he’d been thinking about jumping, that year, and how Mickey’s presence had steered him clear of those thoughts, just by being around. 

”You have intrusive thoughts,” she’d remind him, and sound a little patronizing in that way that really grated on his nerves, ”and you’ve said yourself you were really lonely, it’s not strange to find… creative ways to cope. I’m glad you’re feeling better, and like you don’t need him anymore. This is good, Ian, it’s really good.”

It doesn’t feel particularly good. And Ian still isn’t convinced that he made it all up, but he keeps real fucking quiet about that. He doesn’t have any proof, he has a picture he cut out of an old yearbook, wedged in behind his driver’s license in his wallet, he’s got a couple of articles, detailing a tragedy that took place over sixty years ago, a tragedy he for obvious reasons can relate to, very strongly. He’s got an old lady with silver hair and blue eyes, skirting her dementia but always happy to share a cigarette with him when he brings her cakes from her local bakery, once a week. 

”Fuck Sharon,” Mandy always mutters with a blissful smile as she lights one up from the pack he tosses at her, while kicking off his shoes and leaving his high-vis jacket on her hallway floor. Sharon is the sweet nurse that stops by each morning, to help her with her food, pills, and shower, and naturally Mandy hates her with all the unreasonable vehemency she can muster. The one cigarette she shares with Ian once a week is as far as she’ll go in her rebellion, though, mostly because she obviously really needs the help and only bitches about it because she’s been taking care of herself for sixty years, fuck you very much, and she doesn’t need anyone’s fucking pity. 

Sometimes she reminds Ian so much of Mickey it hurts, but visiting her is the only way he knows how to still feel like he hasn’t lost him completely, so he stops by week after week, smoking and eating cakes and listening to her talk about her life. Sometimes she’s seventeen years old and Mickey’s still alive, and while it’s painful to think she’s slowly losing her grip on reality, he likes to relive her youth with her. Likes to hear about Mickey when she seems to forget what happened to him, in the end, and only remembers him like her annoying older brother with a bad attitude, a secret, and seemingly endless, poorly hidden, love for her.

When Ian first went to see Mandy, a couple of days after Mickey went away, he told her everything. She was surprisingly cool about it, then, ready to believe this mentally ill 22 year old man, turning up on her doorstep and telling her a very tall tale about her long dead brother. She seemed perfectly lucid at the time, though, her readiness to believe him more down to her being ’too old not to believe in a little bit of magic’, and not so much because of her early stage dementia. She ended up holding his hand with tears shining in her eyes, asking him all sorts of questions about her brother, most of which Ian was surprised to find he actually could answer. After, she’d wiggled her eyebrows at him and said she wasn’t at all surprised Mickey had attached himself to Ian, even as a ghost. After all, she said, she always suspected he had a preference for guys with big feet. Then she’d winked and cackled like a goddamned witch at Ian’s mortified silence.

Now, whenever she’d crack an inappropriately sexual joke and cackle at herself, he’d simply grin along and secretly wish he’d known her his whole life.

He starts feeling stalked one day after he’s been to see her. It’d been a bad day and they’d sat together in silence for about half an hour, Ian reading one of the newspapers Sharon leaves behind and Mandy occasionally muttering to herself, only getting frustrated and angry if Ian tried to understand and answer. So Ian’s still got the two cream cakes left when he steps out of her apartment building, pausing outside the door for a second to readjust the bulky pastry box and free his right hand to light up the cigarette he’d been saving to share with her. 

There’s a man on the other side of the street, standing half hidden in the shadow of a doorway. Ian looks straight at him as he puffs on his cigarette to get the embers glowing, and then takes it from his lips to sift smoke through his teeth, squinting a little to try and see if the guy feels familiar for a reason. There is no reason, he’s never seen the torn jeans or the tan shirt before, even though something in the reclined stance sparks some nonsensical recollection deep inside of him. He shakes his head, admonishing himself for standing there and staring at strangers, like some psycho, and starts walking down the street to the L.

But he feels like something, someone, is following him after that. Like if he pauses on the platform in the morning, and looks over the track to the other side once the train has cleared the station, he might see someone there, looking back. And he can’t shake the feeling of not being alone even as he walks through the early morning crowd to his new site and clocks in for his shift, packing his lunch into the already stuffed fridge in the workers’ trailer and taking his hardhat off his hook before resuming yesterday’s dig.

It reminds him a little of how it felt in the beginning, when Mickey had started following him around and Ian hadn’t known if he should like it as much as he did. But it also feels nothing like it, because he doesn’t get that sense of calm Mickey always brought with him. He resolutely shovels some packed soil out of the way to make room for some of the pipes he’s laying down today, and he absentmindedly wonders if Mickey would turn out not to be an isolated case, and he’ll soon have a Ghost Whisperer kinda situation on his hands. He’s not equipped to shoulder that sorta emotional responsibility.

”Gallagher!”

Ian glances up at the big clock mounted on the trailer and then turns to look at Harris, a little annoyed because he’s got twenty minutes left on the clock and a whole lot still to do. Though he’s mostly annoyed with himself, if he’s honest. Working on East Wacker, even with everything going on, he’d had a much easier time keeping some kinda momentum going, and he doesn’t know if it’s his meds screwing with him or just the general adjustment of working on a building from scratch, but he thinks he’s doing a slightly worse job with every day passing.

Harris is standing with someone by the gates, civilian judging by the lack of orange and reflexive glare. Harris gestures to the guy to stay where he is and leisurely starts walking towards Ian. The guy hangs back, shuffling his feet a little and bringing his hand up to his mouth like he’s smoking, even though there’s strictly no smoking allowed on site.

Ian abandons his pipes and climbs out of his hole, picking up a dirty rag he’s got on hand to scrub the worst of the dust and grime off his hands and his sweaty brow as he meets Harris half way.

”What’s up?” he asks when they get close enough to talk at a more acceptable volume.

”You’ve got a visitor,” Harris says and points his thumb over his shoulder, Ian shifts enough to get a clear view of the guy at the gates. He isn’t smoking, but Ian can see him rubbing at his bottom lip, waiting for Ian to join him.

”Don’t know him,” Ian admits, frowning.

”Yeah, well, tough shit, princess,” Harris sighs, like he’s already had it up to here with Ian’s drama, ”he sure seems to know you.”

”Got twenty minutes left,” Ian states, dumbly, because Harris is probably very well aware of that already, ”he’ll have to wait.”

Ian doesn’t like bringing his personal life to work, he never talks about his family, his boyfriends, or his days off with any of the other guys on site. He doesn’t like taking time off other than for the instances he absolutely has to, when he needs to schedule an emergency appointment with his clinic. And he doesn’t like that Harris, who knows all of this about him and seems to appreciate him all the more for it, is the one telling him he’s got some kinda personal call in the middle of a shift. Well, towards the very end of a shift, but still. He doesn’t like it.

Surprisingly, when Harris sighs it doesn’t seem to be because he’s annoyed with Ian; the way he sighs when Lenny sneaks extra breaks to call his girlfriend, or when Vern’s fishing for marital advice after his weekly tiff with the missus. Unnervingly, Harris seems more amused than annoyed by Ian’s reticence.

”Know for a fact you skipped half your lunch today, Gallagher,” he says and almost smiles when Ian rolls his eyes, ”legally you have to do the full half hour, you know that. But look, right, I’ll be a real cool guy an’ look the other way this time if you take off now, deal?”

”Still not done with the pipes,” Ian huffs out, not sure why he feels like he needs to argue, he doesn’t really want to stay and work on the pipes, and there’s something about this guy that keeps looking at him over Harris’ shoulder, blurred by dust and distance and the tall afternoon shadows. Something deeply familiar, and all new.

”Hey, kid,” Harris’ unusually soft tone snaps Ian’s attention back to his foreman, ”know you’re working hard, alright? Gotta learn that these ground up jobs take the time they take.”

Ian fights the bone-deep urge to insist, and instead gives in with a small nod.

”Go tend to Romeo over there and I’ll get Lenny to tarp up your station,” Harris decides, voice back to his ordinary no-nonsense orders. Ian frowns and is left to stare at his visitor when Harris starts walking away before he’s even finished his sentence. He’s dirty and sweaty and tired after a long day of hard work, and whoever this guy is Ian can bet money on that he’s not here with good news.

Ian shrugs a little to himself and when he starts walking closer he catches sight of the guy’s pleased face, smirking while he dutifully waits by the gate as per Harris’ instructions and lets Ian do all the walking. But then the slight smirk blooms out into a full on grin and Ian can’t physically stop himself; he smiles back, wide and helpless, if only for a split second.

The guy looks Ian up and down, and even at a distance Ian can see him lick his bottom lip and then bite it over another wide grin.

”Been a while,” he calls out, like he’s done waiting on Ian to reach him, ”sorry about that.”

Ian feels his heartbeat picking up at the sound of the guy’s voice, and then things slowly start clicking into place. The yellowed picture he’s got in his wallet, while not the most detailed thing in the world, is clear enough in his memory that he can tell the hair is pretty much the same, and the lips, and his eyes. His eyes are blue like Mandy’s.

”Mickey?” Ian asks out loud, because if he’s wrong all the guy’s gotta do is say so. But he doesn’t, he just picks up his eyebrows and spreads his hands out a little, like that explains any of this.

”You look like shit, Ian,” he says and sounds like he means the exact opposite, ”they got you digging for treasure or something?”

Ian slows down a little, worried that this whole thing might turn out to be some kinda hallucination if he gets too close. He wants to call Harris back to confirm that this is not the case, that he can see Mickey too, but he also doesn’t want to take his eyes off Mickey’s goddamned miraculous face. ”But- how?”

”Yeah, don’t know,” Mickey shrugs and Ian stops completely, a couple of feet left between them, and closes his eyes at the sound of his voice, ”don’t fucking care.”

When Ian opens his eyes again Mickey’s staring back at him, and Ian just knows that it’s him. Knows it by the way he fills up Ian’s space with his presence, knows it by the vibrations of his voice, somehow exactly the same as they were when they were only echoes through his mind.

”Shit Mickey,” Ian grins and then he practically leaps the remaining feet between them, grabbing Mickey by the face and pressing their lips together. Mickey kinda yelps and sways back a little on impact, but quickly seems to catch himself and grabs at Ian’s jacket, pulling him in closer, purposefully knocking off his hardhat and parting his lips to bring him in further. Ian leaves one hand on Mickey’s cheek, fingers brushing back into the short hairs behind his ear, and snakes the other down to wrap around his chest in a hapless kinda hug, squeezing him as close as possible. 

Mickey chuckles a little nervously against his lips when there’s a couple of wordless shouts and wolf-whistles coming from Ian’s coworkers, and Ian promptly responds to them by letting go of Mickey’s face enough to give them the finger, but by no means easing up on their baffled, hungry kiss while he does so. 

He tastes really good, nothing like Ian could have ever imagined. Still, he abandons Mickey’s lips and smiles against his jaw, nosing down his neck, when Mickey grumbles a little and kinda tries to shrug out of Ian’s way.

”Fuck you smell good,” Ian mutters into his warm, solid skin and Mickey stops squirming and holds him closer instead, wrapping one arm around his neck and arching his whole body against Ian’s.

”And you smell like a sweaty asshole,” Mickey complains drily, but holds on tight to Ian’s neck when he huffs self-consciously and tries to get away, ”I like it.”

Ian practically groans into Mickey’s shoulder and he can feel Mickey’s cheek move with a wide grin, against the side of his neck.

”This the way you usually greet people first time you see ’em?” Mickey sounds like he wants to tease, but is barely able to get his voice above a rumbly whisper. Ian laughs and breathes in deeply before he very reluctantly takes a step back, just out of Mickey’s reach, letting his own arms hang uselessly down his sides. Mickey’s looking him right in the eye, the way Ian’s imagined him doing so many times before, and he’s practically fucking glowing. It’s nothing short of beautiful, if not a little surreal.

He doesn’t know what to say, he never really does but it’s quickly becoming a problem when he’s suddenly faced with a very much alive and physically present Mickey Milkovich, previously presumed long since gone on every level imaginable. Getting to see him, touch him, is a scenario so off the map Ian hasn’t even dared to entertain it in his wildest dreams. He tries to imagine how all of this is going for Mickey, and it’s like his whole mind blanks.

They go for coffee, because it only seems right when Ian lamely suggests it, wishing to get away from work and his colleagues’ prying eyes.

”Could do with something stronger,” Mickey admits as they’re walking, slowly and side by side, around the corner to a local coffeeshop, ”but whatever.”

Ian bends his head, hands awkwardly shoved into the pockets of his pants. Mickey’s likely well aware he can’t drink on his meds, but it’s never been an issue before. It’s insane, the whole situation. Ian thinks he might love Mickey, he’s been so preoccupied with him since that first time he felt his presence, but he also doesn’t know him at all. And while he’s got no doubt in his mind that Mickey knows him, better than anyone else, after all the things Mickey’s been through there’s a real possibility that he might not know himself. Is he the Mickey who died, abused and traumatized and scared? Or is he the Mickey who survived, six decades in isolation and giving of himself to strangers who never knew he was there, until Ian stumbled into his life. Ian’d been so scared at first, so unwilling to acknowledge this person who felt just as real to him as his own brothers and sisters, but clearly wasn’t real. It’d taken him so long to actually start trying to talk to Mickey, and when he finally did it’d somehow seemed to help Mickey move on, so he’d tried his best to encourage him to do so. Ian’d just assumed that what he felt with Mickey had been entirely one-sided and the last thing he’d wanted was to keep Mickey in limbo for his own selfish reasons, when it was obvious that he’d be better off moving on, finding peace or whatever. But Mickey didn’t move on, he’s here, alive. And whoever he is now, he must’ve found his way back to Ian for a reason.

Fucked up thing is that Ian doesn’t care who he is, not when he’s got Mickey’s shoulder mere inches away from his own, and he doesn’t have to imagine the warmth radiating off him, the sound of his wide steps, the profile of his nose and bow of his lips. Ian will take him however he gets him, if that’s why he’s come back.

They enter the coffeeshop and Mickey gestures towards a table in the corner. Ian sits down, eyes on Mickey as he steps up to the counter and orders for them both like it’s all he’s ever done. Ian pulls a hand through his hair and frowns at how clammy and dirty it feels between his fingers, at how dark with soot and soil the back of his hands and the hairs up his arms are when he holds them out in front of himself for inspection. He shrugs off his unflattering high-vis jacket and winces at the state of the white t-shirt underneath. White being a very liberal description of it at this point.

He decides not to worry about any of that shit when Mickey places two cups of black coffee on their table, muttering ’decaf’ under his breath as he slides one of them towards Ian. His eyes are so soft and unflinchingly on Ian when he finally sits down and Ian’s mind draws a complete blank, just staring back.

”What are you thinking?” Mickey asks after he’s taken his first careful sip. He sounds nervous.

”You don’t know?” Ian tries to tease but ruins it with the way he falters and swallows the last syllable. Mickey used to talk about the way he could hear people’s private thoughts and Ian’d just assumed that it was no different for him. Mickey winces at him.

”Never did,” he says, ”thought that much was obvious. Everyone else, 24/7 all you can eat mind buffet. But not you.”

Ian frowns, wrapping his hands around his still too hot coffee. ”That why you stuck around?”

Mickey raises his eyebrows at him and Ian feels instantly lighter, in every way. It’s such an expressive thing and it reminds Ian of sometimes just being overcome by this _feeling_. Someone does something stupid, and something gently flips inside him, and he’s instantly less annoyed and more inclined to smile, fondly, at nothing at all. He imagines Mickey having been next to him, then, doing his best to sass people with his metaphysical eyebrows.

It’s wonderful.

”Fuck you think, why?” Mickey mutters, but then he takes a deep breath and tries again. ”You were quiet, it was nice, yeah… but that’s not why. Everything just felt better, bein’ around you. Sixty odd years and sticking to you was one of the few things that made some fucking sense.”

”You remember what happened?” Ian doesn’t even really know what to ask about, but he figures if the question is vague enough, Mickey might just tell him everything.

Mickey sighs and scratches at the back of his head. His hair looks freshly cut, it looks good. He’s real, and he’s been to a hairdresser, and he’s got enough money to buy Ian coffee, at least, and he knows how to order from a fucking small batch barista bullshit coffeehouse, some people born after 2000 don’t even know how to do that.

”Woke up in a hospital, man,” he says and Ian just keeps quiet, waiting for him to try and sort everything out, ”thought for sure it was fucking 1954 at first, that it’d all been a dream. But it wasn’t, here I am, here you fucking are. I don’t know what to tell you.”

”When?” Ian asks.

”Been almost three months since I woke up,” he says and nods when Ian widens his eyes, ”kept me at the hospital for several weeks, said I’d been in a pretty severe coma. Came in with a gunshot wound to the abdomen.”

”But that’s-,” Ian starts but doesn’t bother finishing his sentence when Mickey nods again. He was the one who got shot, after all, he knows.

”Tried to tell ’em, who I was,” he smiles a little and shrugs one shoulder, ”but there’s no record of me, no prints, no DNA, no dentals. Couple of dudes with the same name in the Chicago area, but they were all accounted for already. So it was decided that I got amnesia, and something they call PTSD, causing this-” he waves a dismissive hand between them, ”delusion, whatever.”

”They didn’t believe you?”

Mickey scoffs, but smiles softly. ”Fuck no, they believe you?”

Ian shakes his head, returning the smile. ”No.”

”Fuck ’em,” Mickey quirks an eyebrow and his eyes shift away for a split second, bright and soft and amazing when they land on Ian again, ”right?”

”Yeah,” Ian breathes and resists the urge to ask the bored barista behind the counter to confirm that he’s not dreaming, or completely spinning out of control, ”fuck ’em.”

Mickey looks down at his coffee, small frown creasing his forehead, and they drink in silence for a couple of minutes. Ian’s mind is still drawing a frustrating blank and for a moment he wonders if maybe Mickey hadn’t been able to hear his thoughts because he’s actually got nothing in his head, and Mickey’s sitting there right now realizing his mistake, coming here, thinking Ian was something special when all he ever was, was just a bit fucking slow. He stops spinning when he looks up at Mickey again, to see him gently worrying at his bottom lip with his teeth. It makes him want to lean over the small table and touch the pad of his thumb to his mouth, release his lip so he can cross the last foot of space and feel it against his own, again. Well, his mind’s no longer drawing a blank, at least.

Mickey’s lip pops out from under his teeth, as though _now_ he’s hearing Ian’s thoughts, and he slowly runs the tip of his tongue over it. _Fuck._

”You, eh-,” Mickey clears his throat and looks like he’s scowling to cover up for the way the corner of his mouth wants to run away and smile, ”you kinda kissed me, back there.”

Ian does nothing to hide his wide, pleased grin. ”You kinda kissed me first.”

Mickey looks instantly flushed at the memory and Ian loves it.

”Hardly fucking counts,” he mutters unconvincingly and sits back in his chair, knees knocking gently against Ian’s as he spreads them wide under the table, looking like he regains some of his cocky confidence with it, ”you like, out? At work?”

”Sure as fuck am now,” Ian is a little surprised to note that he doesn’t mind this fact, at all, hadn’t thought about it until now, he shrugs when Mickey looks worried, ”whatever.”

”You gonna get a lotta shit for it?” he asks, looking ready to fuck someone up if the answer is yes.

Ian shrugs again. ”Maybe, doesn’t matter. Won’t be the first time, won’t be the last.”

Mickey nods, looking into his empty cup and tipping his head back to try and catch the last drops, probably mostly so he won’t have to see Ian for a couple of seconds.

”You okay?” Ian asks, meaning about the coming out thing specifically, but also about fucking everything.

Mickey puts the cup back down and his face kinda seems to smooth out when he looks back at Ian.

”Yeah,” he says, not entirely convincingly, ”just-, wanted to see you. That alright?”

”Fuck, Mick,” Ian pretty much just wants to hold him, and never let go, ”yeah, obviously-, yeah.”

”I’ve-,” Mickey starts and seems to hesitate, frowning, ”I don’t got a lot, yet, there was this charity bullshit group at the hospital, helped me out with some starter money, with my medical bills and shit. Helped find a lawyer to like, make me a legal person again. Apparently it’s a process, still technically John Doe right now.”

Ian nods, he hadn’t even thought about any of that stuff.

”Got me set up in this group home,” Mickey continues, looking like he would’ve preferred to not tell Ian any of this, ”like, a halfway house. It’s not sexy or whatever, but at least I’m not on the streets.”

”Stay with me,” Ian says it without thinking, a little disheartened by the way Mickey doesn’t seem to immediately take to the idea, ”not like-, _with me_ , unless that’s what you want, but, in the house. You can have Lip’s room, he doesn’t need it.”

”And what if I wanna-,” Mickey says and swallows, ”stay _with you_.”

Ian could fucking burst, but he settles on nodding like some eager bobblehead. ”Then we’ll both take Lip’s room, and he can take my bed when he’s home for the weekends, whatever, even better.”

Mickey grins and Ian presses his lips together to stop babbling, having a real hard time not grinning back. So he stops trying, and it feels so fucking good.

The first night they just sleep in the same bed, clothes on and a carefully maintained distance between them. Ian barely sleeps at all, waking up every now and then just to stare at the curve of Mickey’s shoulder, the silhouette of his face, the mess of his black hair sunk deep into his pillow, until it’s morning and he wakes up to Mickey staring back. Mickey kisses him, inching his face closer until he can fit their lips together and then shuffling his whole body after to awkwardly connect with Ian’s as he picks himself up and takes command of the kiss, looms over Ian and softly working him open, melting him completely with his surprisingly soft, careful lips. And Ian runs his hands all over him, enjoying the way Mickey’s skin seems to react to his every touch, goosebumps and hairs on end, shivers and trembles paving way for the low sighs and moans falling out his muffled mouth when Ian snakes a hand down his boxers, grabbing himself a handful of ass and resolutely pressing their quickly swelling dicks together.

He lets Mickey take the lead, perfectly content with the languid making out and slow way they’re peeling off each other’s clothes. It’s been a while for Ian, but unless Mickey’s been out banging people before he came looking for Ian, it’s been a whole lifetime for him. Ian doesn’t want to rush him, he can wait if that’s what Mickey needs.

Mickey’s heavy and warm on top of him, naked and glorious, when he makes a low, frustrated sound, almost hidden under the slick noise of their tongues and lips stuck together, and he pulls back some, looking a little annoyed when Ian opens his eyes to find him staring down at him, intently.

”What’s wrong?” Ian asks, suddenly worried he’s been pushing it. ”Wanna stop?”

Mickey scoffs and grabs Ian’s hand to bring it down to where their dicks are lined up together, hard and ready. ”Does this feel like I fucking wanna stop?”

”It’s alright if you wanna take it slow,” Ian tries to reassure him, but it only seems to deepen the annoyed scowl. Ian’s fucking up, real bad. Already.

”Fuck off,” Mickey mutters, but the heat in his words sounds more like barely restrained lust, than anything else, ”seen you with guys.”

Ian sucks in a breath and suddenly feels the urge to get out from under Mickey’s settled weight. Like he can see it in his eyes, Mickey seems to make himself even heavier, keeping him locked down.

”Want you to fuck me,” he mumbles, face real close to Ian’s like he’s trying to disappear into him, ”want me, the way you wanted them.”

This is some fucked up shit, but Ian is at least certain about one very important detail. ”Never gonna be that way.”

Mickey dips his face out of sight and Ian groans, he’s such a fucking doofus sometimes. He puts a hand to Mickey’s cheek and forces him to look at him again.

”I-,” he starts but doesn’t know what to say, searching Mickey’s wide eyes. _You what, Ian? You love him? You think you’re never gonna want anyone else?_

”Take you in any way you’ll let me,” he whispers, hoping that Mickey gets it, that he won’t have to lay it all out this soon, tell him things he’s already sure of but not ready to share, yet, ”just tell me what you want.”

Mickey looks down at him like he’s trying to figure him out. ”And what do you want?”

Ian smiles and moves his hand down Mickey’s neck, thumb tracing the firm line of his jaw. 

”Wanna make you feel good,” he says and mouths at the side of Mickey’s twisted lips when he rolls his eyes, ”wanna fuck you slow, first, an’ then harder if it’s good, if you want me to.”

Mickey lets out a distressed puff of air, tickling down the scruff on Ian’s cheek.

”Do it,” he grunts, and Ian doesn’t have to be told twice. He gets Mickey on his stomach and spends a long time just working him open, listening to him and the variety of noises falling out of him, most of it encouraging even though he can’t help breathing out a low ’good?’ when Mickey occasionally curses and hisses, his hips twitching to get away from Ian’s probing fingers.

He keeps getting the same annoyed, breathless ’don’t stop’ whenever he asks, though, so he doesn’t, doesn’t stop. And when Mickey starts rutting against the bed, fucking his ass back on Ian’s hand, he rolls on a condom and slicks himself up, straddling the back of Mickey’s thighs as he lines himself up. Mickey reaches back and grabs on to him, anywhere he can, when he pushes inside, and he starts thrusting almost immediately, encouraged by the way Mickey squirms helplessly under him, trying to get him to move. It’s driving Ian crazy, and he takes control mostly so he won’t blow his load right then and there, instead setting a slow, steady pace, holding Mickey down with a hand to the small of his back, keeping him still.

But when the ’fuck, Ian, so good’s turn into ’fuck, Ian, stop fucking around’, and ’harder, c’mon’, Ian figures he’s not gonna last much longer anyway, listening to that, so he gets up on his knees, pulling Mickey with him by the hips and bending over him to taste the back of his neck, and between his shoulder blades, as he picks up speed and really starts driving into him. He reaches around and grabs at Mickey to jerk him off, finding a rhythm to match his stuttering thrusts, and when he feels Mickey shake and unload into his hand he allows for them collapse down on the bed, draping himself over Mickey’s spent body as he gets in a few final, shallow hits, buried deep inside him and breathing heavily against the back of his neck as he comes.

Mickey’s hand is on the back of his head when he settles, when reality shifts back into focus, fingers lazily combing through his hair.

”Okay?” Ian asks, breathlessly, and huffs when Mickey pats him blindly on the cheek.

”You’ll do.”

His family barely bats an eye when they amble down the stairs twenty minutes later, for breakfast. It would be a little insulting, considering that Ian never brings guys home, but mostly he’s thankful not to get the third degree. It comes later when he quietly announces that Mickey will be staying, indefinitely, and that they’re gonna live in Lip’s room now. Carl and Liam don’t give a shit, but Debbie knows something’s up and Fiona’s got that concerned crease to her forehead the second she hears Mickey’s name.

But they don’t tell anyone what they really know is true and after a few weeks Fiona and Lip ease up on their protective distrust in Ian’s romantic decisions, and they move on to gently ribbing him about going out and finding himself a Mickey that fit, and when they start realizing how serious Ian really is about Mickey, they talk about kismet, and how weird life is sometimes, huh?

They move out in the spring, to a two story house that the owners recently converted into two separate apartments. Their landlord lives downstairs with her husband and two kids, and while they clearly wanted their new tenants to be of a slightly more social nature, judging by the numerous invitations for game nights and barbecues and pot-luck dinners Ian and Mickey excuse themselves from their first two months there, by month three they seem to take the hint and back off a little, and things are good.

Mickey goes back to school, because his name is a blank slate which makes it impossible to find an okay job and he feels that he could do with an update on his education, anyway. He quits, pretty quickly, claiming it to be the ’same old bullshit’ and settling with just taking his GED. Surprisingly, he’s kept in contact with the matron of the halfway house where he’d been staying the first few months of his new life, and within a year he’s working there full time as custodial staff, and eventually as a kind of counselor. Every day for another year he comes home and complains that he can’t believe they let him near those fucked up kids, like they don’t got it bad enough already, and that, whatever, he’ll enjoy it while it lasts, they’re gonna hire a real counselor soon anyway. But they never do, and after a while he stops waiting for the other shoe to drop and subtly shifts to casually complaining about all the stupid shit the little fuckheads put him through, on the daily. Ian says nothing and hides a smile behind his dinner, eating in silence and listening to Mickey until he tires himself out, invariably admitting that maybe they ain’t all bad, deep down.

They go see Mandy together, every week. Some weeks it’s easy, usually when Mandy is seventeen again and thinks it’s perfectly normal to have a conversation with her dead brother, and her dead brother’s nice new boyfriend. Some weeks it’s heartbreakingly difficult, when she can’t look at Mickey without crying. Most weeks she doesn’t recognize either of them and they eat their cream cakes and talk about easy stuff; the weather, the Sox, whatever. Sometimes Ian and Mickey just talk like they always do, and Mandy listens like she’s half asleep, reclined in her chair with her eyelids drooping and heavy. It’s nice, and it hits them hard when she passes after a couple of years, peacefully in her sleep.

Mickey hits a real rough patch after that, and Ian doesn’t know what to do about it. They fight a lot, and it doesn’t always feel enough that they simply seem to belong together. But shit like that doesn’t last, they realize, and with every time they fall it gets a little easier to pull each other back up again. Ian thinks that people don’t belong together if they don’t want to be together, and he takes comfort in that when things are hard but Mickey still seems to want to stick around.

Ian calls him his angel sometimes, just to annoy him, but secretly it’s not really a joke. He’s long since stopped trying to explain what happened when they met, but unlike Mickey who just shrugs and insists on a firm line of ’who the fuck gives a shit?’ Ian can’t help but theorize. His favorite theory is that Mickey, in short, could have been an angel but chose to become human again and stay with Ian, instead of joining the heavenly choir. Ian honestly doesn’t believe any of it, he’s never been religious or had any kinda faith in a higher power, and this hasn’t changed despite all the inexplicable things they’ve had happen to them. But he knows the very real power of his own disorder, and if Mickey being an angel explains his existence in a way that makes him real when the voices of doubt and paranoia try to convince him otherwise, late at night when his meds sometimes don’t manage to entirely dampen his flight or fall, he’ll take it. 

Ian doesn’t think he ever would have jumped but he still believes Mickey saved his life that day, in every other sense. So he calls him his angel, and it’s not always just to annoy him. 

Because Mickey rolls his eyes and calls him a dumbass, every time, and then he kisses him, on the lips, on whatever part of him is closest in the moment, like he wants to make sure he still can. Remind himself that he can be heard, and seen, and kissed.

They have a long, good life, despite the shaky start. And they stay together until their time is up, and death reluctantly does them part.

 

 

 

 

.

**Author's Note:**

> Shoutout to ZoePlacid's [I'd follow your love down a dead end street](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4724882). I realised just now that I probably wrote this whole thing mostly because I reread it recently and got all moody about it.
> 
> Ugh. Okay. I wasn't sure about posting this, was gonna sit on it for a while longer and see if I really thought it worth sharing. But I promised an update for NTW last week and it's not ready yet (I'm garbage, I'm sorry, this week for sure) so I thought I'd post this anyway, as a diversion from my deceit?
> 
> You guys are pretty great, you know that? I like you. *runs away*
> 
> [Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire)](https://youtu.be/6r4uo4lb4h0), [loftec.tumblr.com](http://loftec.tumblr.com/)


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